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Better Hypoxia Training: Rob Bests a Chamber

We sometimes think that another word for hypoxia ought to be denial or, at the very least, the phrase "false sense of well-being" should morph to "self-delusion." In the aviation press, we have beaten the hypoxia topic to a pink pulp, because it lends itself so readily to the pointing of a boney finger at the profoundly stupid things pilots sometimes do. In this regard, hypoxia is the multi-headed beast-we can be dumb about ignoring its dangers, dumb about ignoring training meant to mitigate the risk and really dumb when it actually happens. And how often is that? We don't really know, because even if an accident is caused by hypoxia, the post-mortem may offer only speculative conclusions. In many GA accidents, the true cause may drift downwind with the smoke from the wreckage simply because light aircraft forensics are so inadequate.

Paul Bertorelli
Verified

We sometimes th

ink that another word for hypoxia ought to be denial or, at the very least, the phrase “false sense of well-being” should morph to “self-delusion.” In the aviation press, we have beaten the hypoxia topic to a pink pulp, because it lends itself so readily to the pointing of a boney finger at the profoundly stupid things pilots sometimes do.

In this regard, hypoxia is the multi-headed beast-we can be dumb about ignoring

its dangers, dumb about ignoring training meant to mitigate the risk and really dumb when it actually happens. And how often is that? We don’t really know, because even if an accident is caused by hypoxia, the post-mortem may offer only speculative conclusions. In many GA accidents, the true cause may drift downwind with the smoke from the wreckage simply because light aircraft forensics are so inadequate.

Half of knowing what to do about hypoxia is knowing when youve got it and two recent training programs purport to do just that. Both are essentially desktop technology, one limited to Flight Safety Internationals simulator-based training network, the other is a newer technology thats being marketed by Biomedtech Australia and is available through the U.S.-based AirCare Solutions. We reported on the FSI program in the February 2006 issue of The Aviation Consumer. We demod the Biomedtech program at the NBAA show in Atlanta in September.

ROB Explained

Traditional altitude chamber training is supposed to indoctrinate pilots in the finer points of oxygen starvation and we think everyone should do at least one chamber ride. But chamber training tends to focus broadly on hypoxia-induced performance degradation rather than the hypoxic symptoms themselves.

If you cant get the round peg into the square hole and 96 minus 18 equals 16, you only know that you feel like crap for a lot of reasons and you probably have

Paul Bertorelli

Paul Bertorelli is Aviation Consumer’s Editor at Large. In addition to his valued contributions to Aviation Consumer, his in-depth video productions on sister publication AVweb cover a wide variety of topics that greatly contribute to safety, operation and aircraft ownership. When Paul isn’t writing or filming, he’s out flying his J3 Cub.